“Do not question. Do not elaborate. Do not associate." – Chinese State Information Office

Today we’re going to release the third beta revision of Firefox 4. We’ve been keeping close to our scheduled cadence of a beta release every two weeks, and putting our changes in front of users early and often has yielded – as we’d hoped – fantastic feedback.

We’ve actually gotten so much great feedback from users that we’ve had to create new tools to help us interpret it all. These tools allow us to navigate the 3-4 thousand feedback submissions we’re getting every day, calling out clusters of similar comments and allowing us to gather lists of websites that are reported to have compatibility problems. It’s also nice to see what changes are resonating positively with users on a week-by-week basis!

Over the next two planned beta releases we expect to add more web-developer and user-facing features to Firefox 4, at which point we’ll hit what we call “feature freeze.” After that point, we will spend all of our time fixing bugs and polishing the release for our hundreds of millions of users. It’s during this time that many of the bugs created from feedback reports will be addressed. So keep on letting us know what you like about the new betas, and what isn’t working well for you, and we’ll keep on working with you to make sure that Firefox 4 is moar awesome.

4 Comments

SlavicAugust 11, 2010

I see a lot of good work with every new release of FF 4.0 beta (some bugs and plug-ins problems are too, but they will be fixed soon or later, I see this). Really glad that new interface is looking good and remained flexible as before.
Mike, could you please tell your thoughts or estimations about implementing of thread/process split for any tab in FF? It’s really important thing but I cannot find a reliable source of such info. Maybe it’s not for current release, but is planning later?
Thanks, Yaroslav

I am surprised so many people give feedback. This version feels more smooth and doesn’t lock up too often. I don’t want to jinx myself just yet..Anyway just wanted to say nice work.

Tiago SáAugust 11, 2010

Slavic, I can unofficially say (although I know this for a fact) that out of process tabs will not be in Firefox 4. What’s planned is out of process plugins (for all plugins) and out of process interface. It’s possible that app tabs will have their own process and that some extensions will have them too, but that hasn’t be decided yet.

WionelAugust 16, 2010

when will “firebug” will be available for this beta version version..??